According to the record books, the time we spent in New Zealand was the coldest summer on record in sixty years! We had a great time anyway...

So when we last left y'all, we were in Wanaka for Christmas. Here's a view of Lake Wanaka and the Rippon Winery on a beautiful summer day. This was one of about three beautiful days that we had during Christmas week.

While we were in Wanaka, we did a short day hike to the Rob Roy Glacier. The hike was recommended by locals, and it didn't fail to meet up expectations. Here's a view of the glacier as we reached the end of the trail. What you can't hear is the cracking of the ice on the glacier, which was very interesting to hear as it is looming over us.

At the trailhead, a kea bird seemed interested in our snack. They are very aggressive and there are signs everywhere not to feed them.

Here's a shot of Matt on the trail.

After our hike down, we came across some cows, which seemed all cute and all, but then one of them started to charge us! Matt stood his ground, and the cow backed off.

On the way to the trailhead, we had to off-road it a bit and go across small stream areas marked with a ford sign, not a Ford sign.

Us on Christmas Day on Lake Wanaka.

This is a cool photo of a tree growing out of the Lake.

After Wanaka, we continued our meandering pace around the South Island and headed to Fox Glacier for a day hike on the Glacier. Here's us on the area of the hike which is through a temperate rainforest - right next to the glacier. This is a very unique situation and only happens here and in Argentina. It soon turned icy as we headed up in elevation. We had to wear crampons on this top part. It was a lot of fun to crunch on the ice. Here is Robin on the ice.

This is a view of the Fox Glacier. This is a view of Mount Cook (tallest peak in NZ) on the right and Mount Tasman on the left.

Further up on the west side of the South Island was the Franz Josef Glacier, both with us and without us.

This is another scenic photo taken that day on the road. We drove for about 8 hours that day, which was a long time, especially in New Zealand, but the scenery kept us going.

Another tourist attraction we stopped at were the Pancake Rocks, named because they--yep, look like a stack of pancakes.

The open road. This was a common sight through our windshield.

The only kiwi bird we saw the whole time we were in New Zealand.

As we were driving one early morning we came across a farmer herding sheep along the road. We could only pull over and wait, mostly because Robin was laughing so hard at all the sheep!

We found out that there are a lot of deer farms in New Zealand, for the venison and for their horns which are sold in Asia.

One area that we really wanted to see was the Abel Tasman National Park. (Abel Tasman is the Dutch explorer who "discovered" and named New Zealand.) It's up on the northwest corner of the South Island and has beautiful stretches of beaches and great hiking and kayaking. Unfortunatly, the weather did not cooperate and we were not able to see so much splendor of the coast!

We pressed on to Nelson, an arty town where we got this shot of a gargoyle on the Nelson Cathedral.

In Blenheim, we caught up with a Servas host, Lorraine, who was nice enough to take time out to show us her llamas! She has a wonderful property overlooking vineyards and it was fun to feed the llamas. Blenheim also had a cool bell tower.

Heading in to Kaikoura on New Years Eve, all we could see was blue sky and blue ocean, but that was shortlived. We did have a nice New Years Eve with the hostel hosts and their friends in the garage having a bbq! From Kaikoura, we headed to Picton, to catch the ferry across to the North Island.